20% Time 2/18

This week has been just a little bit different from usual.  First of all, it did take me a long while to even find an interesting tutorial to do.  I found a lot of ideas, but none of the tutorials I saw all sounded like they would have something cool, but the people who wrote them up were either newer a photoshop than I am, or just don’t have anything that I haven’t learned yet.  I finally saw a cool ‘purple abstract’ by John Ward from teamtutorials.com.  So, I got into it, taking loose notes on the tutorial on a PowerPoint document.  The only thing that I needed from the site was the zip file of ‘trance brushes’ in order to make the proper shapes.  So I went home, downloaded it, put it in the brushes file on photoshop, opened a new document, and found out that those particular brushes would not work on my version of photoshop (it’s 7.0).

So because I am not good with brushes yet, I decided to create a picture that I was inspired by from a tutorial by Like.Nota at Likenota Productions.  It was a tutorial for a watch, but it also was very complicated, so I went off on my own and made a picture that looks (almost) exactly like the face of my own watch.

 cc watch obsession by late night movie

Before starting anything, use the auto-select layer feature, it will make things so much easier.  Just click on a shape and it will take you to that shapes layer.  Then, make about four consecutively shrinking circles (ellipse tool +shift to make it a circle).  The bottom one needs a light grey-white reflected gradient, low bevel and outer shadow (make sure not to overuse the global light selection because the shadows will get too dark).  Then the second circle, needs to to have it’s path loaded (ctrl-click on the layer) and then go to the bottom circle’s layer and hit delete.  It should create a shadow around the second.  The the second only needs a black-white reflected gradient (make sure all of the ‘linear’ of gradients go in the same direction, but do not be exact).  The next circle will need another reflected grey-white gradient.  The last circle will need a beige-green/gray angle gradient.  There will be a line, but it will get covered by the hands. 

 cc watching by jurvetson

Go back to the last circle and use the pen tool to make arrow like shapes.  Then use a pillow emboss (use global light for this so the shadows don’t get all messed up) and duplicate it about seven times, rotating it each time.  Then, go to the third circle and use six elongated versions of the arrow shapes (except change to a slightly sharp bevel) and place around the dial.  Two to the top left, two to the top right and one in each bottom ‘corner’.  Put in the numbers, and create three very small rectangles at the very top and place them around the center for the hands (make sure to use one to cover the line from the gradient).  Finally, go to the third circle and make a rounded rectangle with a green/beige color.  Make a few anchor points with the add anchor point tool in the middle.  Then use the direct selection tool to take the sides of the rectangle and drag up.  Then round the middle points with the point conversion tool.  Lastly, add an inner shadow to that shape, and a slight drop shadow to everything else and you are done.

Go here for the picture

(For some reason, the file dosen’t load properly)

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